David Emery Online
Facebook To Launch Music Service With Spotify
Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a music-streaming service that could be launched in as little as two weeks, sources close to the deal have told Forbes.
The integrated service is currently going through testing, but when launched, Facebook users will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeed, along with the usual icons for photos and events.
Well that would certainly be interesting. Presumably this would tie right into Spotify’s (eventual) US launch as well – I’d be surprised if Facebook would do a major venture with someone without US presence.
This comment by Spotify on the story is hardly much of a denial either.
Visit ➔Bronze
Bronze is a new non-interactive music format in which recorded material is transformed in real time, generating a unique and constantly evolving interpretation of a song on each listen.
The first piece of music available in Bronze will be Flesh Freeze by Gwilym Gold.
Interesting stab at the “music as app” concept – particularly of note as it’s not the traditional ambient electronic instrumental music that you normal get with this sort of thing – it has lyrics and everything.
Visit ➔Hollywood shuns intelligent entertainment. The games industry doesn't. Guess who's winning?
And then there's LA Noire, the James Ellroy-inspired crime drama, which has caused a stir, and rightly so, with its firm focus on narrative and staggering new facial animation technology. I'm a massive dweeb who keeps up with the latest gaming developments, and even I was astounded at what they've pulled off here. You're watching actors give genuine performances – within something that is still defiantly and unapologetically a video game.
There’s no doubt that LA Noire isn’t perfect – the game elements in places are a little bit repetitive maybe, and I for one have frequent issues with the interrogation scenes where I have no real idea what my character is going to say next – but there’s also no doubt that it has pushed the medium of interactive storytelling on several great strides.
If anything, it gets all the film-like bits right more so then the game like elements (and more right then many films do), but the way it melds the two together – you really are interacting with the story – is what’s most impressive.
Visit ➔Amazon Sells Entire New Lady Gaga Album For $0.99
We've seen deep discounting before from Amazon. But today the online retailer is hit new lows by offering a download of the new Lady Gaga album "Born This Way" along with a digital version of the CD booklet today only for just 99 cents
Now, I think there’s a reasonable debate to have over what the correct price of an album should be (and whether something more like £4.99 could work out better as a general price point, as some people have argued previously), but I think we can all agree that this just a little bit too low?
Obviously it’s a piece of marketing for the new Amazon CloudDrive service, but considering that it seems to have crashed due to demand I’d hardly say it was money well spent.
I wonder if all those 99¢ album sales count for SoundScan, and hence whether we’re going to see a crazy-high first week figure for the album in the US next week (which is do doubt going to be high anyway)?
Visit ➔3D (sort of) on your iPad without glasses
What i3D does instead is show you several scenes that change perspective as you tilt your iPad side to side and up and down. The effect does not depend on the gyros built into the iPad, but instead uses the camera to track the position of your head and render a changing perspective in real time.
A little bit buggy – it depends a lot I think on the quality of the lighting where you are and the distance you are from the camera – but this is really pretty nifty – 3D without glasses or funny screens (like the 3DS).
Visit ➔
Cloudy With a Chance of Music
I tried Amazon and it just made me depressed. Though I haven’t received my invite yet, the others who have tried Google Music have all said how pitiful it is. Rdio and Pandora are both fantastic at what they do, but the songs you listen to don’t belong to you.
Pretty good run down of all the potential players in the burgeoning cloud-based music market (european readers can replace Rdio with Spotify in this article for the same effect).
Visit ➔Independent Label Market 2011
More photos of the lovely Independent Label Market on Flickr here.
Fans Crack Twitter Code for Sneak Peek at New Batman Film
Hardcore fans of Warner Bros.’s Batman trilogy undertook code cracking of epic proportions Friday after the site for the next film, The Dark Knight Rises, hit the web.
It’s pretty “marketing”, but still kind-of cool (I’m a big fan of the “hiding messages in audio waveforms” thing).
Visit ➔